Key West Pest Control is a Yorkshire-based business, servicing the UK with both residential and commercial pest control services.

Positioned in their industry, as the friendly face of pest control, and a competitively priced alternative to the industry’s big-name providers, with a 100% tailored, client-centred approach to service, Key West are go-to providers of pest control across Yorkshire and beyond, for both homeowners, and local, bluechip, and household-name businesses/brands alike. 

Key West is a returning client for The Marketing Optimist, so when they got back in touch to enquire about how our web design and optimisation services could accelerate commercial leads, we were happy to help.

Our Approach to Web Design and Optimisation

Having established a firm understanding of the business, how it operates, its customers, the industry and market etc, over many years of managing all aspects of Key West’s marketing, we were able to jump straight into the task at hand: taking what we’d previously established for Key West, and adapting it, to increase the generation of leads from prospective commercial clients.

Web Design and Optimisation Strategy

To identify our path forwarded, we began by auditing the existing website, with increasing commercial leads as our goal.

Our audit documents are incredibly detailed and aid in establishing a web design and optimisation strategy. Amongst an enormous list, we identified that we could add five further pages to the site’s ‘Commercial’ navigation item, four covering some of the sectors that Key West support, and a landing page for Multi-site Pest Control, for larger commercial clients. These new pages provided five new high-value keyword opportunities across the site.

A new navigational structure was created and sent to the client for clearance, to clearly show how the site would be expanded, and identify the new opportunities within this new navigation.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential extension of our auditing process, and is perhaps the most crucial stage of any web design and optimisation project, to turn a website into a 24/7 conversion or lead generating machine. 

Starting by making a note of the key term for each page across the existing website, and the real life search metrics associated with each term, we took our new navigation, and conducted extensive keyword research for each page listed, comparing new terms and their metrics, with existing ones. 

We identified that 13 of the website’s total of 22 keywords could be replaced with relevant terms with far greater search metrics, and found a further opportunity by combining two existing commercial pages with lower value key terms, into one page with a high value key term. Taking these new keyword opportunities into consideration, along with the new opportunities identified in the auditing process, we identified a huge number of ways we could help Key West achieve their goal.

Site Design and Development

Having designed and built the existing website, we were very familiar with the CMS (WordPress and the Divi builder) and the site’s existing layout. As we would be increasing optimised copy across the site, the Marketing Optimist team set about collaborating on how we could adapt the design of the website to facilitate the new expanded content, help modernise the feel of the site, and better position Key West for commercial clients.

The pest control industry isn’t one flooded with technically built websites, and unlike our industry of marketing, there’s a distinct lack of highly graphic sites. In our view, in an industry like this, one that isn’t perhaps the ‘nicest’ to discuss, this more modern, graphic approach to web design, would be perfect for Key West in maximising commercial lead generation.

We applied our new design to a clone of the Key West website under a different URL, a process of best practice we apply to web design and optimisation projects, to leave the client’s existing site live, and unaffected throughout the process.

Copywriting & Page Optimisation

Sometimes, when it comes to the briefing stages of a web design and optimisation process, clients can be confused by the importance of detailed content in effective optimisation.

Having worked with us before, Key West were fully aware of the important role copy plays in positioning their brand within their industry, perfectly exposing their unique offering and style of service, establishing credibility, and of course, generating conversions/leads. They also trusted in our Copywriter’s knowledge, who had previously worked on the Key West account, to craft new optimised copy for every page, that spoke directly to the target reader, and led them to conversion.

22 website pages (or 48 pages of a Google Document) later, we gained client clearance for our new copy, and populated the development site with it.

Next we applied page optimisation across the website. This process is no mystery, and no black art, it’s merely a number of factors across the content, and elements in the back-end of the page, that need to be considered to achieve effective optimisation.

With this, the site was ready to launch under the main URL.

Keyword Tracking and Reporting

Once we had published the site, we tracked the key terms used across it, using industry leading tools that monitor these terms, and the search landscape around them, to identify their rankings.

Probably the most important part of any results-yielding web design and optimisation project, is reporting, to gauge the effectiveness of optimisation, and indicate where efforts need to be targeted to increase the optimisation across the site. Key West will receive monthly SEO reports going forward, along with Google Analytics data to track website visits and conversions.